I don’t exaggerate when I say we were in the Middle of Nowhere. It took two hours driving out of Columbia Falls, Montana (all in all a pretty decent contestant for the Middle of Nowhere, America Award) a drive that took us through a national forest (half of which, I might add, is currently on fire) and an hour of which went through a dirt road, on which we only passed a single car.
“That’s Larry,” said Matilda, the woman whose cabin we were going to stay in. “He can suck a big fat dick.”
We hadn’t really believed it until we were physically in the car, that one out-of-the-way ride had led us to a cabin on the Canadian border of Montana. One of our hitchhiking hosts had invited us when we told her we were going to Montana.
“Matilda, she’ll love you! She’s this feminist anarchist and she has all these cabins up in the mountains in the middle of the woods. No electricity, no toilets, no internet, nothing.”
That was in Boise, Idaho, a town we’d spontaneously gone to when picked up by a freelance writer in Washington. Sara turned out to be one of our best rides so far– she was so generous that she even convinced her husband to let us stay in their extra bedroom.
“Honey, I picked up two hitchhikers. Don’t worry, they’re safe. Michaela’s this adorable redhead with a huge smile– she looks like Annie. And Kevin’s this peaceful, feminist boy,” said Sara as me and Kevin smothered our mouths to hide our laughter. Sara, a natural marketer, convinced her husband and Matilda the Anarchist alike to let us crash.
And thank god, too, because so far Montana had been a roughish place.
“Be careful about steal camping,” said Molly, our ride up to northern Montana. “People are very into property here. And everyone’s carrying.”
“There are more guns than people in Montana,” said Rob, our ride to Columbia Falls. “Me, I have twelve.”
The night before we’d asked two people if we could sleep on their lawns– one had politely said no and the other very impolitely said no.
“Absolutely not,” the grizzled man said as he tended a very frilly garden. “Keep on walking.”
“The characters in Lonesome Dov would be crying at the modern state of Montana,” I said, thinking of the book whose characters had traveled from the Texas border to northern Montana to find the last bit of wilderness there was.
(In Montana’s defense, we were in Big Fork, a place creeping with rich people with a notorious reputation. And if I’ve learned one thing over the last few years, it’s that rich people hate being asked for things.)
So we’d slept that night behind a community center, and the next one alongside a river in an unofficial campsite. The first night we were mostly scared of the get-off-my-property guys, the second night mostly of the animals (well, I was, anyway.)
“What kind of wildlife do you have around here?” Kevin had asked Molly, a recent graduate who’d just come back from a hiking trip. “As in, dangerous wildlife we should watch out for.”
“Let’s see… wolves. And wolverines, of course–”
“That’s an actual animal?!” I said, thinking of Hugh Jackman.
“Moose are pretty aggressive, and of course grizzlies–”
“Ah!!”
“And black bears.”
“I’ve heard black bears aren’t so much a problem?”
“Yeah, no, they kill far fewer people than grizzlies.”
Not really sure how to deal with these creatures, I settled for 1) being terrified at night and 2) hiding food in trees.
During the night every sound became terrifying, though probably 89% could have been attributed to foraging deer.
“What the hell was that?!” I whisper-shrieked to Kevin when we were camping on the riverside. “It sounds like a cheese grater hitting a cymbal.”
“Don’t worry, it’s just a deer. Haven’t you ever heard a deer before?” said Kevin.
“No, have you?”
“No,” Kevin admitted, and the mystery remained unsolved and slightly terrifying. (Along with one sound we heard in the San Juan islands that I’ll transcribe as “squee-wabba-wabba-wabba-woooOOOW.” which sounded remarkably like Fred Flintstones’s catchphrase, and I can only assume was an escaped cartoon character.)
In short, we were happy to have a place to sleep inside (that wasn’t a bear’s digestive system or a county jail.)
Matilda was getting her masters in Boise, and had only come down to town for her twentieth high school reunion.
“I hate these bastards,” said Matilda, before and after the event. Matilda had milky blue eyes, straw-blonde hair and a sailor’s mouth that went completely unchecked around her two young kids. She’d known Sara in Boise because she was married to a professor and couldn’t leave the state in the midst of her divorce. “It’s some fucking patriarchal bullshit,” she said. “State law in Idaho won’t let you leave the state if you’ve got kids in Idaho.
“See Montana isn’t Republican like Idaho. It’s Libertarian. We genuinely just vote for the best candidate. That’s why the governors are always 50/50 Republican vs. Democrat. You have to cater to both interests here or we kick you out. Problem is, all these Californians keep moving here. Now they’re some die-hard Republicans.”
That’s the interesting thing about Montana– it’s hard to peg. Tons of guns but also tons of weed– no ostensible queer culture but no gendered bathrooms.
In the same way Matilda was radical but hard to peg– she was probably the first real anarchists I’ve met, which is saying something considering I’ve met many many people calling themselves anarchists. But most anarchists these days in Liberal circles are simply contemporary communists with a new spin. They’re apolitical, something Matilda was very against. “In my anarchist days we’d have dinners and talk about fucking up the system. Hippies just talk about their gardens.”
Definitely true, in my experience.
So there we were, riding down the road with Matilda and Sara, who went instantly into unsupervised-mommy mode. Matilda was smoking a spliff, and Sara rolled down the window.
“I don’t want my kids to smell it on me,” Sara explained.
“Ha!” replied Matilda. “My kids would love it. They’ll be like, ‘You smell like Mommy.’ Hold on. I need to send Jack a tit pic before we lose reception.”
Me and Kevin howled with laughter as Matilda slowed the car down while Sara aimed to take a picture with her phone.
“Don’t you fucking look!” Matilda directed at Kevin, who directed his smiles to the forest view as Matilda lifted up her shirt. “Let’s get the ‘You’re leaving Columbia Falls’ sign in the shot,” said Matilda.
The picture was taken and we were on our way. The mountains were too dark to see but it seemed we could feel them. We’d spend two days in a place that was America in name alone.
“
this is real this is fiction 